Mom's Boyfriend Tortures, Kills Her Baby; She Posts Message to God

I just don't get it. I had no formal training in logical fallacies and had to play catch up in them once I decided I was not an agnostic, I am proudly atheist. Are some people so indoctrinated in dogma they cannot see the foolishness of things they say? A woman in a city near mine posted a social media message to the effect that she does not understand why God decided to take her young daughter at this time, a child, but she is comforted by the idea the girl is "there in Heaven with you, Lord." God sent a boyfriend to the mother; now, he's under arrest, charged with physically abusing the girl, who later died in a hospital. Why would God so hate the mother He would take her child from her? Why couldn't God have seen to it that the murderer got run over by a semi prior to ever entering the mother's house. Epicurus said God can be omnipotent and God can be good, but God cannot be both good and omnipotent.

Michael -- and that is my middle name, so aren't we cursed to bear the cross of archangelic names? -- statements such as you recommend will befuddle them, and they are not fair game. One of my closest friends is devoutly Christian and when I told him some truths about religion he later confessed that I had "messed with [his] mind," implying he wished to not hear any more stories about, e.g. how Constantine slaughtered Arianist bishops, the Ark could never hold seven pairs of all the dinosaurs, and like incomprehensives. The only reason we say God destroyed Sodom is that we personally do not like Sodomites. If there was a meteorite that struck Sodom, God was the one who sent the meteorite. (And if you think the last one sounds post hoc, consider the Rev. John Hagee saying Katrina was God's punishment on New Orleans for hosting gay pride events. I wondered, why hasn't he sent a disaster to WeHo?)

when I told him some truths about religion he later confessed that I had "messed with [his] mind," implying he wished to not hear any more stories about, e.g. how Constantine slaughtered Arianist bishops, the Ark could never hold seven pairs of all the dinosaurs, and like incomprehensives.

That suggests you were actually getting somewhere with this person. Maybe after a long time, he'll start investigating more along those same lines himself, and become de-convinced.

{{{sigh}}} and even if logic/reason took over, and she became atheist, fundies would remind her that she shouldn't be angry at God, and that He needed another angel, and she needs to accept this as part of The Plan.

The calmness of her statement is creepy. Sure, people all mourn in different, perhaps unexpected ways, but I'd be batsh!t crazy out of my f(#$ing mind with anger if I were her.

I just got done with a rather lengthy dialogue with someone who was openly entertaining the thought that an event he witnessed was the result of divine intervention. The event was his brother losing his wallet, containing credit cards, cash, a conceal carry permit, and some religious doohickey he got as a child. He found the wallet by cleverly recreating the circumstances by which it was lost.

He, and others, could not grasp the abject ignorance of the thought that there is a god who is helping comfortably well off individuals find their lost wallets, while simultaneously ignoring the prayers and desperation of innocent starving children who will most certainly die. It's no coincidence that he is also a gun zealot from the Deep South.

When I believed in psychic phenomena and the supernatural I found a lot of evidence for it. Now that I no longer believe in such things, I find that what I called "evidence" before is not there at all. Some "evidence" is merely because of a strong desire to believe.

I once knew some Evangelicals who told me that whenever the group of them disagreed on how to address an issue at their church, they would pray and god would tell them all the same answer. Of course what really was happening was that everyone would simply fall in line with what the first person said after the praying session was over, to complete the illusion of speaking with god ... because god cares more about what color to paint the narthex than helping poverty stricken children who are praying for rain that never comes.